Lit Hub Daily: May 7, 2019

• “Eudora Welty’s photographs were…a way to see a time and place I’d only encountered in history books and my grandmother’s stories.” Natasha Trethewey on experiencing a past not our own. | Lit Hub
• “The Chateau Marmont is a psychic landmark as well as a physical one”: how a run-down Hollywood hotel achieved legend status. | Lit Hub
• “Halldór seems to hate everything and everyone—which makes for enormously amusing reading!” On the selfie-filled memoir of Halldór Laxness. | Lit Hub
• Revisiting lost spaces: Patricia Dwyer on Elizabeth Bishop, loss, and coming out after 20 years in a convent. | Lit Hub
• “I write about my father and myself by writing fiction about failing minds.” Erika Swyler on the autobiographical truths of fiction. | Lit Hub
• Five writers, seven questions, no wrong answers: Binnie Kirshenbaum, Ryan Chapman, and more take the Lit Hub Questionnaire. | Lit Hub
• Birthing calves, writing novels: John Connell on passing life’s tests, big and small. | Lit Hub
• Rabbits For Food author Binnie Kirshenbaum recommends five unforgettable novels of mental distress, from The Return of the Soldier to Mrs. Bridge. | Book Marks
• Leah Schnelbach recommends 5 Sci-Fi and Fantasy books to heat up your May, from Ted Chiang’s Exhalation to Karen Russell’s Orange World. | Book Marks
• Vince Houghton on Stanley Lovell, the real-life Professor Moriarty behind some of America’s most devious special weapons and spy gadgets. | CrimeReads
• “Brawler, he said. The other girls told me what happened and I didn’t think they’d let you out.” Read a new short story by Lauren Groff. | The New Yorker
• Why have some of Los Angeles’s oldest brick-and-mortar indie bookstores been shuttered in recent years? Amazon isn’t the only answer. | The Hollywood Reporter
• “Spite is a fantastic creative motivator, especially since Martin has said that his ending is somewhat different from the show’s.” George R.R. Martin still has time to save Game of Thrones. | The Outline
• Presidential biographer Nigel Hamilton, who has written about John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and more, is coming out with the final volume of his trilogy on FDR. | The New Orleans Advocate
• “I am very good at stories. Like my mother, who is a lawyer, a litigator. I am also, like my mother, good at indignation.” Lynn Steger Strong’s story about her mother. | The Cut
• “There are so many ways to justify feeling inadequate about an acceptance.” When winning an NEA Fellowship changes everything (just not for the better). | Fanzine

Also on Lit Hub: Laurent Gaudé in conversation with Aysegul Sert • Jacques Schiffrin and the creation of Pléiade Editions • Read from Ma Jian’s new novel China Dream